How to kill Windows process automatically with a .BAT file

One of the easiest ways to speed up Windows is closing unnecessary taks and processes. That's why sometimes we want to kill many Windows programs / processes, but we do not want to disable neither manually nor forever. It could be a group of programs that we rarely use, but which require some system process running permanently. So when we turn on the computer with other task in mind, we don't want these unneeded processes consuming Windows resources continuously.

That's why we are going to create a batch file (.BAT) which with a double click on it will kill as many Windows processes as we want.

And after the name chosen for this file we should appen the .bat file extension. That's how we create a Batman file... well, no, a .BAT file (batch process).

To save a .bat file using notepad we have to change the file type, which is by default Text Files (*.txt), choosing All Files. This is very important. Otherwise, we would just creating a text document called "whatever.bat".txt, and that won't work.

Let's also pick the ANSI encoding type for this process kill bat file.

And finally, we click on the save button to store the file.

By default, this creates a file with an icon like this icon, depending on your own system icon configuration set.

Now, whenever we want to close every Windows process specified in the file, we only need to double click that file, and it will perform the automatic process killing for us.

Running a .BAT file is like running the Windows command prompt code to close all the processes, but these batch files perform all the necessary actions automatically, in no time.

We can also check a complete and detailed list of the values and parameters that we could add after "TASKKILL" just clicking in Start / Run (Windows + R), typing cmd (to run the Windows command prompt), and typing at this window: TASKKILL/?.

Running processes with .BAT

If we want to reopen every Windows process previously killed with our .BAT file, with no need to reboot Windows, we can automatically perform the reverse operation, creating another .BAT (same process as before) this way:

NOTE: This trick to run or kill Windows process also works to create a .BAT file to automatically open our most used apps (using the "START" Windows command), and another .BAT to kill these programs (the TASKKILL command file).

Where to find free images

Let's face it: a good and eye catching image can improve your articles, websites and presentations.

But you already knew that you couldn't reuse any image that you found in Internet, didn't you? Most images out there are copyrighted, even if there aren't any explicit copyright statements or watermarks on the image. That means that you cannot pick and use whatever you find using Google Image search, for example.

So if you want to find a really free image, you have to look for an explicit license statement in its website, that entitles you to reuse such photo or graphic. One of the most popular licenses is Creative Commons, which lets you share your work with specific permissions.

But how do you find images under Creative Commons licenses? Don't worry: the 2 most popular search engines have been upgraded to cover this issue:

Yahoo Image Search now allows you to filter search results according to the Creative Commons License type. On top of that, Yahoo now owns that huge database of photographs called Flickr, and the image search results will also include free images from Flickr.

It seems that Google Image Search has been planning a similar update, and now, this kind of free image search can be done at Google Images using URL search parameters. Google will be adding these free image search options to the main interface of Google Image Search soon, but in the meantime, you can use this free image search form.

There's another trick to discover domains that contain free images under Creative Commons licenses. Most of these sites link back to the Creative Commons webpages or icons. So you can perform an advanced search at your favorite search engine of webpages that link to the Creative Commons icon and that contain your target image keywords.

As you see, Internet is full of free images that you can use, if you know how to find them.

Free ebook sites - download free PDFs the legal way

Did you know that there are plenty of quality books out there, that you can download for free in a legal way?

Here are some of the best free ebook download sites available:

Free computer books is probably the best site to download software or computer programming related ebooks. It's probably the first site I would check when trying to learn a new programming language, or improving my computer skills in a very specific subject.

PDF geni is a search engine specialized in finding free ebooks in PDF for download. It even offers search term suggestions and a glimpse at the hottest search terms.

Project Gutenberg it's the good old initiative of turning every classic with expired copyright into a free downloadable ebook. So if you are looking for a classic book to download, check that page. And if you want a bunch of interesting suggestions, try the top 100 most downloaded ebooks.

Google book search started somehow like Project Gutenberg, storing PDF versions of classic books. But now it has grown much bigger thanks to interesting agreements with book publishers. And now you can download plenty of quality ebooks, modern of classic, with no cost at all.

With Internet, knowledge has no barriers (and nope, I'm not talking about piracy). So go download some free quality ebooks and PDFs at those sites and increase your knowledge!